Henry had successfully invaded the campus by slipping under the fence, strolling right into the cafeteria with slumped shoulders and a scowl, and picking up a tray in the line as if he were any other registered student at the Northern Reserve Academy. The guard on duty at the front door had given him a dirty look when he'd first stumbled in from the freezing cold, snow covering his shoes, but the guard had been too busy looking at Facebook on his phone to wonder how a student might have fallen almost twenty minutes behind his classmates on the way to lunch.

"So then I see this guy sitting at a table eating macaroni and cheese, and I sit down across from him, and he doesn't even look up at me," Henry chuckled, casting a side glance at Trey on the other side of me. "I had to kick him under the table and be, like, Trey, man, long time no see."

I elbowed Trey in the ribs gently to chide him, and saw a glimmer of a smile on his lips. I was sure Henry Richmond was probably the last person he expected—or hoped—to see sitting across from him in the cafeteria at the Northern Reserve Academy.  

"I wasn't sure what was going on," Trey admitted. "Maybe it should have been obvious, but I didn't realize he broke into school. I thought for a second, you know, that maybe he'd ended up there, like me. All I knew was that the original plan had been scrapped, because I had a note in my mailbox at the dorm saying my mom had cancelled my doctor's appointment, and I didn't know what you guys were up to."

"I've got to say, bro," Henry said in high spirits, "I don't know how you've suffered through the food in that joint. You'd be better off eating toilet paper and chalk."

I could sense Trey fighting the temptation to be friendly with Henry and was privately a little humored that the wall between them seemed to finally be crumbling. Demonstrating maturity far beyond his eighteen years, Henry seemed to understand how dire it was to release whatever competition existed silently between them.

"Pretty much," Trey agreed.

The drive to Mt. Farthington would take us ten hours. My eyelids grew heavy from physical exhaustion, and the endless miles of flat, snow-lined road that spanned the windshield from one side to the other blurred my vision. The dullness of wintry northern Wisconsin was like a visual lullaby. I nestled my head against Trey's shoulder and drifted off into an uncomfortable, shallow sleep.

Around three in the afternoon, when Henry considered the distance we'd put between ourselves and the Northern Reserve Academy to be adequately safe, we stopped at a fast food restaurant for lunch. Trey carried his box of Malibu Sunbeam off to the men's room without an argument, requesting that we order a turkey burger and fries for him. Even though he barely had a half-inch of hair around his head, he agreed that disguising himself would be in our collective best interest. He did, however, admit that the idea of being a criminal on the run, just out of reach of the local police, kind of appealed to him. I would have found the humor in our situation, too, if the complexity of cornering Violet and forcing her to play a game with us wasn't still so terrifying.

I left Henry at the register and took the waxy fountain cups that we'd been given by the fast food clerk behind the counter over to the soda machine. The restaurant was quiet at the odd hour—an older gentleman wearing a Brewers baseball cap sat in a booth alone, his jaw gently rolling in a rhythmic motion as he chewed, his eyes fixed in an upward gaze at the television mounted from the ceiling. The quiet audio drifting out of the television suggested that a late afternoon televised court show was on rather than the local news, which was a small blessing. When I absent-mindedly withdrew the first cup I'd filled with ice from the automatic ice dispenser, ice continued to pour out of it, spilling onto the floor. I placed another cup beneath the machine's spout and tried to manually adjust the lever with my hand to make it stop. But the lever was loose, and no matter how I positioned it, the ice just kept falling...a clamorous, wet avalanche that filled the second and third cups within seconds.

"Um, excuse me? I think your ice machine is broken," I called out over to the clerk wearing a green visor behind the register as he handed Henry his change. He leaned over with a blatantly helpless expression of curiosity on his face, as if I'd just announced that the ice machine had turned into a dragon.

"Oh, let me see about that," the clerk said, disappearing behind the counter in search of a manager.

Henry and I took a seat in a corner booth and smiled at each other in silence as the ice machine calamity continued to perplex the small staff at the restaurant. The machine finally fell silent when it ran out of ice to spew, moments before Trey slinked out of the men's room and trudged to our table. With his hair a shocking shade of light yellow, his eyebrows and eyelashes seemed darker. He sat down next to me in the booth and immediately reached for my left hand under the table, reiterating what I already knew—we were going to find a way to stay together from that point onward.

"How far are we?" Trey asked after taking an enormous chomp out of his burger, causing an eruption of lettuce and tomato slices to fall out from between the buns.

Henry pulled up his map app on his phone to show us both the blue line stretching from Wisconsin to Michigan, the path we'd take to arrive at Mt. Farthington. "See the little red thing? That's us. We've still got about eight hours of driving ahead."

Eight hours of driving. At that very moment, the junior class was probably assembled in the gym for a parting lecture from Principal Nylander about conducting themselves like ladies and gentlemen and representing Weeping Willow High School with honor while on the trip. I could just picture Matt Galanis, Mischa's boyfriend, performing his impression of Principal Nylander, his head bobbing from side to side and his mouth forming words robotically, for the entertainment of Kevin Pawelczyk and Oliver Buras. Surely Jason Arkadian's mother would be chaperoning on the trip; everyone liked her because she drove a Mustang and had ombre highlights like a movie star. Hailey West and Abby Johanssen were probably sitting in the bleachers with their Kate Spade overnight bags at their feet, eye rolling and whispering about how stupid and annoying everyone else was. And just as it occurred to me that Tracy Hartford's mother was always a chaperone on field trips, I realized that I'd barely thought about Tracy Hartford since I'd left Weeping Willow to go back to the Dearborn School for Girls.

" Henry, have you heard anything about Tracy lately?" I asked, even though there was a strong likelihood he wouldn't have any idea about Tracy's current health condition. Mrs. Richmond and Mrs. Hartford were old friends, but since the little visit we'd paid to Tracy in the hospital over Christmas break, it was fair enough to suspect that the Richmonds weren't receiving updates from the Hartfords anymore.

Henry's eyes turned downward and he drummed his thumbs nervously on his cup of soda. "Yeah, about that," he said, his tone making me worry even before he continued. "Tracy's still in a coma. Her doctors have already told her parents that at this point, they have to prepare themselves for the possibility that she's suffered brain damage. If she comes out of it."

A tinny, high-pitched tone filled my ears and time seemed to slow down a little bit, as if in a bad dream when you're running from monsters and no matter how fast it seems like your legs are pumping, you don't feel like you're accelerating. Tracy was getting worse—Mischa's time was being shortened by each passing minute, if we were still correct in assuming that the order in which Violet's predictions came true was determined by the order in which they were given.

"Is there any chance that they might take her off life support?" Trey asked in between swallowing his bite of burger and taking a long sip of soda. His words matched the pace of my exact thoughts as if he was reading them from a script in my head.

Henry's eyes offered an apology as he glanced up at me before replying, "Yeah, her doctors have actually suggested that."

"Oh my god," I said, perhaps a little too loudly.  The old man wearing the Brewers hat looked at us over his shoulder. "What about Mischa?"

"I wouldn't worry too much just yet... you know how Tracy's mom is," Henry said in a rational voice.

Henry had a point: Mrs. Hartford was deeply religious and would no doubt want to keep Tracy alive as long as medical science permitted, most likely adopting the view that taking her daughter off life support was a form of murder. But, Mr. Hartford was a man of few words (my mother often cruelly joked that Mrs. Hartford did enough talking for the both of them) and seemed to be a very sensible guy. He had been a manager at the county's waste management service for as long as I could remember (which was why kids at school joked that talking trash must have run in the Hartford family, since that was Tracy's specialty).

My throat tightened a little with fear when I thought of Mischa, all alone at the Preet Wellness Center, having no idea as to our progress toward breaking the curse. She had to know, despite whatever activities she was engaging in there to keep herself distracted, that her situation was grave. When I tried to imagine how she was feeling, I immediately became so worried about how my mother would cope with my death that I felt my eyes welling up with hot tears in the burger joint booth. I thought of that fateful, terrible night in Olivia's basement when I'd known—simply known—in the marrow of my bones that we were getting ourselves in over our heads, and futilely wished I could rewind time and prevent Violet from tempting us into playing that game.

"Time to go," Henry said brusquely in a low voice, startling me out of my reverie. He lifted his tray and rose from the table, keeping his head down. I followed Trey's eyes toward the television set, where a commercial announcing the news stories that would be covered during the scheduled broadcast was airing. "A teenage couple escapes from local boarding schools and law enforcement officials warn they're presumed to be on the run—and potentially dangerous. The full story at five," the attractive newscaster in a mauve suit said in a musical delivery. High school pictures of both me and Trey, the ones taken by the strange bald photographer who brought his photographic equipment to our school and set up annually just outside Principal Nylander's office to take our pictures for our student ID's, appeared on the screen. I cringed at how hopeful and happy I looked in my photo. That had been the first week of school in September, before Olivia's sixteenth birthday party, before Violet's game.

The vinyl of the truck's front seat was cold enough to make me shake when we slid back inside to continue our drive. It chilled me right through the pair of jeans that Mrs. Richmond had loaned me, and my teeth chattered uncontrollably. It seemed like an hour passed with the heat blowing directly on us before my muscles began to thaw and unclench.

The grim winter-scape surrounding us on all sides began to wear on my nerves after another hour on the road. We talked in spurts about how we would lure Violet away from the other kids and what we'd try to accomplish by forcing her to play Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble, but each time one of us began talking, we arrived at the same conclusion: planning was pointless, we were just going to have to review our options once we got to Mt. Farthington. At just a little past four, the sky began to lose light. While darkness was a welcome change from the monotonous blank clouds and gray snow—bleeding into each other at the horizon—that had encapsulated us all day, it made me even more eager to reach our destination and get off the road. I ached to lie down and fall into a deep, restful slumber, even though I suspected that when the circumstances to sleep presented themselves, my thoughts would be preoccupied with curiosity about Violet's activities in Michigan.

With whom would she be sharing a hotel room?

Would she attempt to predict anyone else's death on the trip?

Would she ever stop?

Finally, after nightfall, there appeared to be a break in the heavy forest that surrounded both sides of Henry's truck after we'd driven through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for a few hours. Henry had relented with his rap music and insistence on impressing us with his memorized lyrics, and had even let us switch the radio to Top 40 hits by then. It was almost seven o'clock by the time we reached the rest area in St. Ignace, Michigan and saw ahead of us the manned toll booths through which we'd pass to reach the Mackinac Bridge, an astoundingly long suspension bridge that would carry us over the icy waters of Lake Michigan toward Michigan's Lower Peninsula, our destination.

"Man, I don't like the looks of that bridge." Henry  slowed the truck down a few feet before we reached the toll booth, consternation shaping his expression.

"Why not?" I asked, and when Henry just shook his head without saying a word, I knew the answer to my own question. It had been a while since Violet's evil spirits had messed with us, but there was no denying we'd be vulnerable as we crossed a five-mile bridge spanning the point at which the deep waters of Lakes Huron and Michigan connected. In the dark. With the wind blowing... and with very few other cars on the bridge with us at that hour. The spirits had already demonstrated that it was a piece of cake for them to drain our cell phones of battery power and block reception. If anything happened to us in the middle of the bridge, we would potentially be helpless until another vehicle passed us.

"Four dollars," the toll booth operator told Henry when he rolled his window down. The heat of the truck was immediately replaced by a bone-chilling gust from outside.

Henry fumbled with loose singles in his wallet. I let my eyes wander ahead toward the long, long bridge, the edges of its deck dotted with street lamps, flickering against the blackness of the night. I could see the first tower, well-lit with golden floodlights, beckoning and reassuring, summoning us to come closer. The light from the street lamps bounced off the surface of the calm water on both sides of the deck, generating glimmers of amber-hued texture that brought a sense of dimensionality to the otherwise black scenario before us. The shimmering water looked strangely welcoming until I remembered how Trey had described the nightmares of his childhood. Whoever had filled his head with those awful scenarios encouraging him to kill himself had made death seem appealing. It was as we cleared the toll booth and found ourselves about to cross the bridge that I knew we could expect a visit from those spirits at any moment.

"Henry, just wait," I said.

We were the only vehicle southbound on the bridge heading toward the Lower Peninsula. Even though it was an odd hour of the evening on bitterly cold Friday night, that seemed questionable to me.

"Do you guys have a bad feeling about crossing this bridge?" I asked. To my right, Trey stared out at the bridge's towers, his expression unreadable. To my left, Henry ever-so-slightly scowled.

"Aw, come on, McKenna. Don't freak me out," Henry said quietly.

"What? You're the one who just said he didn't like the look of the bridge," I reminded him.

"I know," he admitted, "but there's no other way to get to Mt. Farthington at this point unless we drive all the way around the bottom of Lake Michigan. That's easily another day and a half of driving. I don't like driving over bridges, in general. This one is just... God, that's an awful lot of water on both sides."

He didn't have to say what another day and a half of driving probably meant: if it had been predicted that Stephani, Hailey, and Abby would die during the ski trip... then Mischa and Tracy could be expected to die before we even reached Mt. Farthington.

"Should we ask that thing of yours whether or not we should cross?" Henry asked.

This summoned Trey's attention. "What thing?" he asked.

I hadn't been able to tell Trey anything about our visit to the occult bookshop in downtown Chicago, or about Laura and her recognition of my abilities. He knew nothing about the pendulum in the pocket of the coat I wore, and I had no idea how he was going to feel about the suggestion that I had any kind of supernatural ability. It would have definitely raised alarm if I'd communicated anything like that during the last ten-minute supervised phone call we'd had before I'd slipped away from Dearborn.

I replied quickly, not wanting to go into details, "It's a pendulum. We got it at a store that sells paranormal stuff." It was my intention to push the full explanation about my potential abilities as a medium off for another day, once all of the problems with Violet and the game were behind us... if that day were to ever come about.

"You shouldn't be playing with that kind of stuff," Trey said sharply, making me instantly ashamed that Henry had brought it up. "I mean, honestly, after everything we've been through, why would you guys want to attract their attention?"

By their attention Trey meant them—Violet's spirits, and he was right. I slid lower in the seat between Trey and Henry, desperately hoping that Henry wouldn't mention that I'd already used the pendulum inside the truck without first burning sage to cleanse and protect the space, which now seemed like an absurdly irresponsible thing to have done.

"Besides," Trey continued in a softer tone, "It can't help us. I can already tell you what's going to happen on the bridge. I dreamed about this last night, I just didn't realize what the dream was until I saw the bridge lit up like this."

Uncomfortably, I waited for Trey to continue.  He was never eager to discuss his dreams, and I thought it was partially because he believed that by talking about them, he was validating them in a way. Making them more real.

"Okay, so what happens in the dream?" Henry asked.

"It's ice," Trey said. "The bridge is covered in ice and a truck hasn't come through in a while to salt it. That was the dream, the truck dropping rock salt all the way across."

"Ice," I repeated. Of course it was ice. "He's right. I think Jennie was trying to warn us in the burger restaurant when that ice machine broke. There was ice everywhere and I couldn't catch all of it."

"Great," Henry sighed. "So, what should we do? Drive back into the last town we passed and try to find a hardware store selling rock salt?"

"It won't make a difference," I muttered, straining my eyes to see the second of the two towers of the bridge in the distance. "The bridge is too long. We can't salt an entire lane that's five miles long."

"We'll just go really slow," Trey said firmly. "Really slow. Be ready to pump that brake."

Henry eased the truck back into motion and I heard him say under his breath, "Maybe he should drive," but I knew Henrydidn't really mean that. He had to know that Trey couldn't drive, he'd refused to get behind the wheel ever since the accident in which Olivia had died.

As soon as the truck was thirty feet out onto the bridge and I saw water on both sides of us, my heart began beating at an alarming rate. The side rails on the bridge were very low; if I'd gotten out of the truck and stood beside one of them, they probably would have reached my hip. We drove at a snail's pace toward the tower with Henry's high beams on. Every patch of snow on the road in front of us was a threat and could potentially be masking a sheet of slick ice underneath it. At the rate we were driving, it seemed like it was going to take us an hour to cross the bridge, an agonizingly treacherous exercise in courage and patience.

When we were about one hundred feet away from the first tower, all three of us perked up in unison at the sight of approaching headlights. Another vehicle was crossing the bridge, coming toward us from the opposite direction.

"At last, some company," Henry said.

But the vehicle was driving at a relatively normal speed, exponentially faster than us. We continued along in our lane, but as the vehicle grew close, something about it seemed disturbingly familiar. There was nothing remarkable about it; as it grew closer to us, I saw past the circular haze around its headlights to identify it as a small black car, perhaps a Ford Focus.

"I know that car," I said uneasily. "There's something about it that's very familiar."

Trey leaned forward, studying it more closely. "That's the car that ran us off Route 32 on Christmas Eve."

He was absolutely right. We'd been forced to swerve off the road that night, the night we'd driven far beyond our town's borders in search of Bloody Heather, by a little black car driven by a middle-aged man with wire-rimmed glasses... exactly like this one, crossing the bridge in unison with us. It made no sense at all, this driver in this car and whatever it was doing driving back to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan from the other side.

"You guys are freaking me out," Henry said. And as he said those words, the black car hit a patch of ice about fifty feet ahead of us in the other lane. I screamed as I saw it lurch forward and jackknife, spin 180-degrees and slide directly at us.

"Jesus!" Henry exclaimed, ducking.

The back end of the black car hit the front fender of Henry's truck, sending a powerful jolt through the body of the truck. All three of us lunged forward and felt our safety belts strain across our chests to prevent us from hitting the windshield. In a flash of events that happened too fast to process, the impact from the black car spun Henry's truck around by a few degrees of an angle before it continued along its path, crashing into the guardrail. In the moment that the black car hit the guardrail, we could all see the driver's face—his eyes enormous and surprised. His hands fluttered about the driving wheel as he tried to jerk it in both directions, but his desperate last actions made no difference. The speed at which he'd been driving when he'd hit the patch of ice had been sufficient enough for his car to hit the flimsy metal guardrail and twist it over the edge of the bridge.

"Oh god!" I yelled as the three of us watch the black car disappear over the side of the bridge. The two disjointed halves of the broken guardrail dipped over the edge of the bridge marking the point at which the car had made impact. Without that huge, unmistakable dent, it would have been easy for us to have convinced ourselves that we'd imagined the whole thing. The car made no splash as it hit the water, or if it did, it didn't hit the water with enough force for us to have seen the splash from the deck of the bridge. If it made an awful crashing noise as it hit the surface of the icy water, we didn't hear it over the Drake song playing on the radio.

We watched in static horror for a few seconds as we caught our breath, too afraid to climb out of the truck. The heavy wind blew and shook the truck gently with its power.

"What the hell," Henry said.

"Do you think we should check on that guy?" I asked, knowing in my heart that we should but, also a little legitimately frightened that my body could be blown over the bridge by wind if I were to step outside the safe confines of the truck.

Trey smirked. "Well, he's a goner. I mean, that water is icy."

We sat in silence and even though I was inclined to tell Trey that there was nothing funny about watching a man fall to his death, he had a point. Even if the guy was able to escape from his sinking car, the fact was, it was submerged in fresh water that was so cold that the surfaces of both lakes were frozen in places.

"Okay," Henry said after calming himself down. "There have to be cameras on this bridge. The toll booth operators or someone will call for help, and it's gonna look really bad if we just sit here like idiots after watching someone die." He took a deep breath. "I'll go take a look. Mckenna, you get behind the wheel and don't even rest your foot on the gas pedal."

Me and Trey nodded in agreement and Henry climbed out of the truck. In the haze of the truck's high beams, he walked gingerly toward the guardrail, keeping a safe distance from the place at which it bent over the side of the bridge, at which it would have been all too easy for him to have tumbled over into the water. A moment later, after bending and stretching his neck for a better look at the waves, he turned toward us, shrugging.

"Nothing," he said, shaking as he got back into the truck. "That car must have just sunk straight down."

"So, what do we do?" Trey asked. "I think we should just keep driving. I don't like being out in the middle of this bridge."

That was the question... we were barely halfway across. It would have been terrifying to continue moving forward, and terrifying to drive back to our starting point.

All the while, the clock was ticking.

"Okay," Henry finally said. "I'm going to call the police and explain what happened. But you guys can't be here when they arrive. Who knows what's going to happen—if the dude in the water is dead, they may want me to go into the station and fill out some kind of report."

Trey and I looked at each other worriedly.

"Where should we go?" Trey asked.

Henry held up his cell phone. "After I call for help, you guys are going to take this and walk back over the bridge from where we came. Try not to let the toll both clerk see you, and wait for me at the rest stop. I'll meet you back there when it's safe for me to pick you up."

I mentally steeled myself against the cold. It was a long, long walk back to that rest station. At least two and a half miles, in bitter cold.

"Dude," Trey objected, "it's really cold out."

"I know," Henry admitted. "Do you have a better plan? I mean you guys are, like, fugitives. I know it sucks, but it's better all around if you guys hide out."

Henry called 911 and we sat in the truck until after he'd ended the call. "You guys should get going. I don't know how long it'll take them to get here, or which direction they'll be coming from."

Neither I nor Trey bothered reminding Henry that we'd be completely lost if he didn't come to retrieve us as he said he would. We didn't have to tell him that Mischa's life depended on him wrapping up this matter of the submerged car as quickly as he could. Instead, I leaned over and pecked him on the cheek and he pressed his warm cell phone into my hand.

"Be careful," he warned us.

Not because we were excited to go to the St. Ignace rest station by any means, but rather because it was too cold to even think about anything, we both began trotting back toward the toll booths. The deck of the bridge was slippery with a thin layer of packed snow, and although it seemed like it had been thoroughly salted in some places, leaving the exposed asphalt dry and bleached beneath the streetlights, we were still cautious not to move fast enough to risk falling. Only once did I turn around to see Henry's pick-up truck idling so very far behind us, its high beams lighting our way until we'd traveled beyond the reach of their rays.

As we approached the three toll booths, we realized something we hadn't noticed on our way over the bridge the first time—only one of two of the booths were manned and open for passing traffic, one for incoming traffic and one for outgoing. We scurried over to the outgoing lane that was closed to vehicular traffic and ducked around the empty brick booth just in time to see the approaching headlights of a cavalcade of emergency vehicles—two fire trucks, several police cars, and an ambulance.

As the first vehicle in the procession—a police car—stopped at the toll booth so that a uniformed police officer could speak with the toll booth operator (who appeared to be surprised by the sudden uproar), Trey and I crouched and watched through the dirty windows of the toll booth behind which we hid.

"God, I hope they hurry," I whispered, feeling my legs freeze. My eyes were running and my exposed earlobes burned.

"Good job, evil spirits," Trey muttered. "This is a mess."

We were both thinking the same thing: there was no way Henry was coming to pick us up any time soon. After the fire trucks cleared the toll booth, we made a run for it, bolting as fast as we could past the entrance to the bridge. I breathed easier once we had completely passed the water and were back on real ground. The trees ahead reappeared on both sides of the road, and I knew that the rest station wasn't too far ahead—it was the last point at which families intending to cross the bridge to stop and use restrooms before continuing on all the way across.

As we jogged that last quarter mile in the dark, steam pouring from our chests as we breathed heavily, our chests overheating beneath our winter coats as our extremities grew increasingly numb in the relentless wind, I began making myself irrational promises. The rest station will be warm. There will be hot chocolate. You'll be able to sit in a warm corner and go unnoticed until Henry surfaces...

But of course, when Trey and I reached the expansive parking lot at the rest station, we'd arrived just in time to see the lights inside go dark, and the uniformed guard who had just locked the station up for the night climb into his beige Elantra... the last car in the lot. It was barely twenty degrees outside, we had nowhere to hide, and no way of getting in touch with Henry until he was in a safe place to call us on his phone.